Weed Wars

"Keep children safe!" Gao and the others shouted. "No marijuana here!"

Inside, city staffers were leading a series of sessions described by El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero as a "medical marijuana workshop." But medical marijuana opponents saw it as little more than a propaganda campaign to further the city's agenda to become a pot-growing hub. Gao and other opponents argue that the medical marijuana facilities are too close to homes and schools, will bring pollution and crime, and will and send the wrong message to children.

"The 'marijuana mayor' wants to make El Monte famous as a cannabis city in the San Gabriel Valley," said Gao, one of the leaders of the opposition. "We can't let him do that."

Since the beginning of 2019, the city council has approved five separate medical marijuana operations whose total size equals nearly three football fields. The structures, all in existing warehouses and other spaces zoned for industrial use, are clustered between a Home Depot and a residential neighborhood of apartments and modest single-family homes, less than a block from an elementary school.

All of the projects were approved by the El Monte City Council, led by the enthusiastic support of Quintero, who says the 2016 initiative approved by California voters legalizing recreational marijuana sent an unequivocal message that cannabis is now a part of life in the Golden state. "Whether we like it or not," Quintero said, "it is around us."

Long plagued by financial challenges and presented with a surge of interest from cannabis growers, El Monte has seized the opportunity to bring much-needed revenue to city coffers. Now, with the first facilities underway and many more in the pipeline, a long-simmering battle has intensified, pitting proponents against a newly energized opposition led by Asian residents of the city and nearby communities. Six additional proposals to grow medical marijuana in El Monte now under review by the city are expected to receive a similarly warm welcome, and opponents, led by Gao and other Chinese American residents of the area, are turning to more drastic measures, including launching a recall of Quintero, who has served as mayor for a decade.

To be sure, not all Asian Americans in the area oppose the facilities. Some support them, albeit quietly, while others remain neutral. What's new is the outspoken opposition among those who typically opt not to make a fuss.

Robin Wang, director of Asian Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University, said the medical marijuana protest runs counter to the overall low engagement of Asian Americans in politics and civil discourse. The El Monte protest is an opportunity to galvanize a community and sow the seeds of permanent change, enabling them to find their voice on an issue they care about deeply. "This protest proves that Asian American do care about certain things," Wang said. "Their voices are being heard.

The workshop, which Quintero said he organized to try to assuage opponents, included a dozen speakers sharing expertise on the history and uses of medical marijuana, as well as cannabis science and cannabis for pets. Interpreters were available to translate the sessions into Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. For those who wished to watch remotely, the entire event was live-streamed.

"Once our voters get informed of what this is and where this is, the kind of processes and regulations that are involved," Quintero said during a workshop break, "I feel very confident that they will agree with our position."

The battle between the city and a newly vocal contingent of Asian American residents in El Monte and neighboring communities first emerged in 2017 when the city renewed a cannabis ordinance, enabling the proliferation of non-retail medical marijuana businesses. Since then, the city has forged ahead with its plans for the centers, despite the increasingly vocal opposition, rooted in a cohort of organizers who are finding their political voice.

"If they can get what they want or to prevent what they don't want, then it might be a good learning experience for protesters," Wang said. "They will learn that their own voices matter, and this is a way to exercise their civic duty."

About a quarter of El Monte's population is Asian and two-thirds Latino. In neighboring Temple City, Asians make up more than half of all residents, and in nearby Rosemead that rises to 60%. These communities reflect the overall demographics of the San Gabriel Valley, home to more than 524,000 Asian Americans, about half of them Chinese, with the number of majority-Asian American cities or neighborhoods in the region doubling from six to 12 in recent years, according to a recent study.

In preparation for the workshop, the city sent canvassers door to door, with invitations to the event written in Chinese. Quintero said he hoped it would help get "everyone onto the same page," or at least cool down the rhetoric a bit.

The workshop attracted a total of about 100 people from a range of ethnic groups. But Quintero said he was disappointed that most of those who opposed the facilities remained outside, or stayed away entirely. An informal count found a total of ten self-identified opponents in attendance. Among them was Sharon Liao, an international student coordinator at San Gabriel Christian School in the city of San Gabriel, several miles west of El Monte.

Liao said her reason for attending the workshop was not to educate herself about the efficacy of medical marijuana. She said she and other opponents had already conducted their own research, sharing their findings in a group discussion on the WeChat social media app.

Rather, she said, her intention was to ask specific questions about El Monte's plans for shielding children at the nearby school and in the adjacent neighborhood from any ill effects from the burgeoning industry.

With a reporter looking on, she raised her hands three times. Each time she was ignored by the workshop leaders. Liao said she was disappointed that no one at the workshop was willing to acknowledge her so she could ask her questions.

Liao said the snub left her frustrated and reinforced her sense that Quintero and city workers advocating for the medical marijuana facilities were dismissing her concerns, reducing them to a stereotype.

"The mayor gave us a label saying we were stubborn and unwilling to learn," she said, speaking in a mixture of English and Chinese and describing what she said Quintero told protesters. "But that was just simply not true."

As the gathering neared its conclusion, Liao summed up her impressions of the day. "I think this is 'one person saying' instead of a workshop," she said.

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"It's not in our culture. We tend to mind our own business," Pan said. "And a lot of immigrants, they only speak Chinese. There is a high wall for them trying to even begin to understand the political process, so it is very hard to them to get involved."

Among voters, Prop 64, the statewide initiative that legalized marijuana in California, drew support from 72% of African Americans, 69 % of Latinos, 62 % of whites and 57% of Asians, according to a UC Berkeley poll. That initiative appeared on the same ballot as the 2016 presidential election.

Historically, presidential races draw a higher voter turnout than non-presidential ones. But nationwide, nearly half of eligible Asian Americans didn't vote, according to the Pew Research Center. And in that election, voter registration among Asians in the San Gabriel Valley who are eligible to vote was just 20%, according to according to Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles.

Without easy access to important information about elections or issues, some less-engaged residents feel they don't have the knowledge to vote or give voice to their views, Gao said. "Some people don't understand English and are not willing to express their thoughts," he said in Chinese.

As a leader of the medical cannabis facility opposition, Gao, 45, is working to change that. Gao, who has a day job as a technology support analyst in the Los Angeles County Mental Health Department, is also co-founder of the Chinese American Equalization Association. The group was created in opposition to the divisive and ultimately unsuccessful proposed amendment to the California Constitution known as SCA 5, which sought to overturn the ban on affirmative action in public higher education and hiring.

Gao is a co-founder of the Chinese American Equalization Association, created in opposition to the divisive and ultimately unsuccessful proposed amendment to the California Constitution known as SCA 5, which sought to overturn the ban on affirmative action in public higher education and hiring. After finding success with that protest, Gao began to take part in other protests on behalf of the Asian community and eventually become one of the leaders of the anti-medical marijuana movement.

Gao had moved to Los Angeles in 2003, he and his family eventually settled in Rowland Heights, in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, in the heart of the Chinese community. After finding success with the SCA 5 protest, Gao began to take part in other protests on behalf of the Asian community, and eventually become one of the leaders of the anti-medical marijuana movement.

Gao said his opposition to marijuana of any kind stems from personal experience. His name originally is not "Zig Gao," but "Zig Jiang," which sounds a lot like the Zig-Zag brand of tobacco rolling paper.

"People in high school made fun of me because my name sounds like Zig-Zag," Gao said in Chinese. "Someone even told the teachers that I sold marijuana." Gao said he was so angry and humiliated by the false accusation that he told the teachers it was true. After that, he said, he changed his name.

During those years, Gao said he had classmates whose marijuana use contributed to overall delinquency, leading them to drop out of the school.

Working alongside Gao in leading the opposition to medical marijuana factories in El Monte is Ken Meng, 57, who moved to the San Gabriel Valley from Hawaii 19 years ago. He now lives in Rowland Heights with his wife and three children. Meng has retired but still works as the president of the Greater Los Angeles Communities Alliance, an outspoken opponent of the grow factories. The organization, launched by Asian Americans, aims to unite ethnic groups to advocate for the rights of communities, Meng said.

"As more and more resources are available for drugs, more and more problems will be caused by those who take drugs in society," Meng said in Chinese. "If drugs flood in, America will be hopeless."

But Meng and Gao say that most of opponents protesting the cannabis factories are not activists; they are teachers, government employees, restaurant owners. They are longtime residents of the area who are concerned for the safety of their community. And have never protested anything before. Many of them showed up for the first time in December of 2018, when the City Council of El Monte was set to consider the very first medical marijuana facility.

Nearly 200 protesters packed the hall. The session continued until well after midnight, and more than 100 opponents stuck it out, awaiting their turn to publicly voice their concerns about safety, pollution, and traffic. Despite their opposition, the council voted in favor of the facility.

After that, Gao and Meng shifted gears, launching a petition-driven referendum to overturn the first medical marijuana project, proposed by developer Teresa Tsai.

"Nearly 300 volunteers knocked door to door day and night asking El Monte residents to sign the petition," Zig Gao said. "They didn't even rest for the Lunar New Year festival."

Within a month, they'd collected the 5,750 signatures-15% of El Monte's population--required by law. Now the city is reviewing the signatures to confirm their authenticity. Once that process is complete, and if the petition passes muster, the city will have two choices: repeal its approval of the medial cannabis center or call a special election and put the project to a vote by its residents.

"We put a lot of effort to it," Meng said in Chinese on the day they handed in the signature books. "No matter the results of the referendum, we already succeeded by collecting almost 6,000 signatures."

With the guidance of Gao and Meng, the volunteer operation opposing medical marijuana stays active and connected, sharing progress and difficulties in real time via WeChat. Typical volunteer work includes making posters, printing "no marijuana" t-shirts and going door-to-door to persuade more residents to join them.

Beyond those who are actively involved in the protests, there are others who say they, too, oppose the cannabis factories. Jacky Chen has lived in the city of San Gabriel for 10 years. He works as a delivery driver full-time, and a part-time Uber to support his family of four. His elder son just got accepted at University of California San Diego, and his younger son is in primary school.

Although it would cause financial hardship for him to uproot his family, Chen said that if the medical marijuana factories move in, they will move away.

"I don't want America to be like this," Chen said. "I have settled my life here. I don't want the place that I love get involved with crime and drugs." Chen said that to his mind, when it comes to the dangers to a community, there is no difference between marijuana and opium. "Drugs are drugs," he said. "It doesn't matter if they are strong or light."

Chen said his concerns are rooted in lessons Americans might not be aware of, but that are all too familiar to anyone who knows Chinese history. In the mid-19th century, Britain went to war with China in part to defend its highly lucrative practice of exporting large quantities of opium there. Britain's victory was a crushing blow to China, leaving a permanent scar on the Chinese people, Chen said. He said he doesn't want to see a repeat of that experience here.

Chen's fears are not surprising in light of China's history, said Clayton Dube, director of the USC U.S.-China Institute.

"Many Chinese people don't differentiate between marijuana and opium," Dube said. "Most Chinese see opium as epitomizing China's vulnerability in the 19th century. Many fear that their community may be associated with a legal vice. They worry that marijuana will be more accessible to their children and will lead to other drugs and problems."

In this regard, El Monte Mayor Andre Quintero, said he sees parallels with his own life experience. Quintero grew up in Colombia in the midst of the brutal drug wars where violence, crime and death were a part of daily life. In addition to serving as the mayor of El Monte, Quintero works as a prosecutor in the Los Angeles City Attorney's office, a job he says helps him feel he is working to make the region a safer place.

He said he is now able to see the difference between his early life in Colombia and what is happening in El Monte today.

"I have family members who were kidnapped and had other bad experiences because of the cocaine wars," Quintero said. "If as a prosecutor, as a Colombian with that kind of experience, I can open my mind and see the possibilities that a product like this can have in terms of healing powers, then maybe our friends in the Chinese community can do the same."

But the opposition to El Monte's grow factories does not stop at the city line. The factories themselves sit on the border with Temple City, its more affluent neighbor to the north. In fact, many of the protestors live in Temple City and Rosemead, two cities in close proximity to El Monte that can more easily afford to put their concerns about the ill effects of the grow factories above the lure of the cash cow they promise to provide.

Temple City is currently operating with a balanced budget, according to its most recent fiscal report, and Rosemead is operating with a surplus of more than $1 million. By contrast, El Monte foresees a $4.8 million deficit. Whatever El Monte's financial woes, some residents of nearby cities don't view the proliferation of medical marijuana factories as a viable remedy.

"El Monte needs to realize what happens in El Monte might not just stay in El Monte," said Vivian Chen, who lives in Temple City. "It will come across to the street: fire, robbery, groundwater pollution." Chen and her husband own and run a restaurant in Temple City and frequently provide free meals to anti-medical marijuana facility volunteers.

In January, Temple City sued El Monte over the grow facility situated closest to the city line, arguing that the city failed to sufficiently review the potential environmental impact of the plant, as well as the toll it might take on infrastructure and other resources. The city of Rosemead later joined the suit. Temple city attorney Gregory Murphy said city officials were "disappointed that the projects are exempt from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act" and vowed to continue the battle against them.

Robert Chen, controller of the El Monte Green Group and its associated company Green Alliance Association named in the suit, said on the advice of his attorneys he's "not talking to anyone until the lawsuit has been settled." Bill Nosal, the general manager of the group, also declined to comment on the lawsuit.

He and other developers of the medical marijuana factories have repeatedly assured residents that proximity would cause no problems such as foul odors, ill effects on their health or their overall quality of life. In light of those assurances, a reporter asked if he lived nearby.

Nosal was reluctant to provide that information, or other details about himself, beyond saying that he lived in Orange County. He said his hesitation stemmed from the fact that someone had stalked the proprietor of the first project to be approved by the city.

"Opponents posted Teresa Tsai's address and went to her house," Nosal said. "This is not appropriate."

Nancy Fong, a medical marijuana opponent who lives in Temple City, two blocks from the site of Tsai's cannabis facility, acknowledged that she looked up Tsai's home address online.

"I want to ask her in person: you lived in the area, and how could you do this to our community?" said Fong, a stay-at-home mom with a teenage son.

"Marijuana factories will make my son think using marijuana is ok," she said. "There are already kids selling marijuana in the school. I don't want these go deeper, further."

Tsai did not respond to multiple email and phone requests for an interview.

Nosal vowed his business won't bring crime to the community. To the contrary, he said, El Monte will be a safer place.

But some residents are wary of the assurances of Nosal and other cannabis facility owners. For them, the presence of high-volume drug production operations in such close proximity-whatever their stated purpose-is cause for alarm. Vanessa Young has lived in Monterey Park for 11 years. She was born in China and moved to Hong Kong as a young child, where she witnessed residents protesting for various causes but never partook-until now. "I can't stand such large quantity of drugs in the community," she said. "Even if they are for medicinal uses."

Even as an outspoken contingent of the San Gabriel Valley's Asian community has found its political voice in opposition to medical marijuana, those who favor it or are neutral have, by contrast, been relatively quiet. They include the developer of at least one of the factories and top executives at another.

The first project approved by the city was put forward by Tsai, who is Taiwanese and lives in Temple City. In a story published in the Los Angeles Times, Tsai described herself as coming from a "traditional Asian family." The second approval went to Green Mountain Alliance, controlled by Wee D. Hin, and its associated company El Monte Green Group, led by Robert Chen.

Andy Huang, a cannabis business specialist and featured speaker at the El Monte medical marijuana workshop in February, said operating such businesses in the city will help to quell illegal marijuana operations.

"Illegal marijuana is everywhere," Huang said. "We need to have [a] regulatory framework in place now, or we get run over by illegal [cannabis] in a few years."

Huang said historically, efforts to ban marijuana have failed. He said Asian opponents to medical marijuana in El Monte were "mislead" and "misinformed" by activists with their own agenda that is not in the best interest of the city.

"Marijuana has been banned since 1932, but now in 2019, we are still surrounded by illegal [marijuana] everywhere," Huang said. "Does the banning work? It's time-tested not to work."

Peter Liang, 63, a recently retired retail finance manager who lives in El Monte, said he has used recreational marijuana for more than 30 years. He said he's attended several meetings in El Monte related to the medical marijuana issue, including a planning commission meeting in January, where he'd planned to speak in favor of factories but gave up and left when the meeting dragged on for several hours.

Liang said that the first time he tried marijuana was in the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1987, which wiped him out financially and led him to the brink of suicide. "The crash made me lose almost everything," he said. "But marijuana relaxed me and helped me chill."

Indeed, some communities where marijuana is legal have seen benefits along the lines of those described by supporters of the El Monte factories. In Washington State, law enforcement leaders attributed a drop-in crime in part to legalization of marijuana. And a study in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization comparing Washington, where marijuana was legal, with Oregon, where it was not, found that legalizing cannabis led to a significant decrease in criminal activity. Colorado communities have earned tens of millions of dollars annually from legal recreational marijuana in the past five years, according to a Denver Post analysis.

But there are also complaints about the unpleasant smell of pot grows. Two Colorado landowners won a lawsuit after the odor from a marijuana grow made horseback riding unpleasant.

Opponents of the El Monte factories include odor among their concerns. The smell of cannabis plants is determined by chemicals called terpenes and terpenoids. The bigger the grow, the bigger the potential stink, according to a report from The Register-Guard in Eugene, Oregon. But Huang dismissed such concerns.

"In California there are a lot of people illegally growing marijuana in houses," Huang said in Chinese. "If they grow illegally and secretly, neighbors can't find any smell. How can legal planting with regulation stink?"

El Monte hasn't fully recovered. The city's $8.4-million deficit in the last fiscal year was due in part to residual effects from the recession, as well as steep increases in pension payouts. For the current fiscal year, the city anticipates a $4.8 million deficit.

If all of the approved and proposed cannabis businesses are established and successful, it could bring anywhere from one million dollars to $12 million to the city each year, Quintero said. According to current projections, El Monte anticipates $70 million in revenue this year, mainly from sales and property taxes. Another $12 million would not only balance the budget but generate a surplus of more than $7 million. "That is significant," Quintero said.

According to city estimates, each project developer will pay El Monte $828,700 in fees the first year and increase 15% each year. Another $175,000 would go to a "community benefits fund," which Quintero said he hoped would help persuade El Monte residents currently opposed to the factories to change their views.

El Monte residents are not as well-to-do as their neighbors. The median household income there is $43,500 a year, while in neighboring cities such as Arcadia and Temple City it's nearly twice that, according to California-Demographics.com. Quintero himself earns a mayoral salary of just $32,816, according to Transparent California, a public pay and pension database. His salary as a prosecutor in Los Angeles City Attorney's office $136,573 before benefits.

"The money will go to after-school programs, education about illegal drugs and alcohol," he said. "These resources don't go to my salary but go to services that benefit the community."

Quintero said the factories will also bring jobs to El Monte, which requires all new projects in the city to hire El Monte residents for at least 10% of all positions. Tsai's proposal calls for hiring 46 employees, and Chen's says his plant will hire 60, which means in total the first two projects are required to hire at least ten El Monte residents in their cannabis facilities. Although the proposals didn't specify how much they will pay to these workers, a study from Glassdoor found that cannabis-related jobs pay 11% more than the U.S. median salary.

But whatever the benefits, opponents say that to them, the cost of opening the grow facilities is too high.